Somebody
asked me the other day, ‘hey Rex, how did you go from being a ghetto kid to
riding horses?’ I should be more specific: somebody at the ‘Occupy’ rally in
McKinley Park, doing those fingers up and down twinkles when they agreed or
disagreed with something. And there were others on the fringe giving us some
different finger signs. But let those go for now. As for the presumption that I
had been a ghetto kid, it was true: 35th and Douglass was a
different neighborhood a half century ago—whichever Douglass it might’ve stood
for then—but, yeah, Stevie Wonder got it right with ‘Village Ghetto Land’. When
I was in my final year of high school and I heard those violins on the radio,
“killing plagues the citizens, unless they own police,” I didn’t know what side
of any street I wanted to walk.
Or stand
on—walking implied I had somewhere to go. I was a scratch basketball player,
playing back-up for a point guard that eventually got to the Sweet Sixteen—can
tell you more about him over a double scotch—and so I was able to travel across
the city to play in gyms of stifling screams and sweat. I saw a lot of life
from the bench—spectacular play, bunglers, trash talk, colors in the stands,
focus and abandon—every game had celebration and not a little anxiety about how
things would end. Cops showed up arbitrarily—hard to know who made those calls,
well before all these cellphones today. Weirdly, I knew I had a safe spot on
the bench, more or less. But I wasn’t sure that’s where I’d want to stay.
Back to
those horses, and why a black man from the hood would dare be on one. My fellow
mounties know this story already, so they’ll keep me honest on the details. I
was deployed as a U.S. Marine to Beirut in the early ’80s—ROTC had taught me
just about everything about being in a conflict zone except how to deal with large animals. Especially in knee-deep
snow. We were called to the mountainous area of Qatarba to rescue civilians
besieged by Druze militia and blizzard conditions—the latter more likely to
kill them. We stuck together as much as we could, slip-sliding on this turn and
that, and at one point when my armored vehicle needed a tow, a middle-aged man
on a horse came bolting out of the underbrush, like a mortar of snow. The horse
tumbled and crushed the man’s leg as they bowled into the ditch on the other
side. Me and Sergeant Addams looked incredulously for a second and skated over
to see what we could do. The horse maybe blacked out a bit, but God Almighty
did she get back on her feet and drag the poor guy by the stirrup. Addams got
down by his chest and did a half-nelson to pull him further down the ditch, and
I—for the first time in all my born days—reached for the reigns and swung my
body up the ditch. And wouldn’t you know, the horse complied!
Turns out
they were on a doctor run. His wife, he gasped in Arabic I was trying hard to
learn, was battling a birth that wasn’t going well—he acted it out as Sarge was
tightening a tourniquet for his broken leg. I asked where the doctor was, and
he pointed vaguely at the town a steep mile away. We quickly talked it
over—Sarge and me and another marine—and drew straws, so to speak: since I
still had the handles on the mare, I was the one to logically find that doctor
and escort him back: it would be ten times faster, Addams said, than waiting to
get towed out of this mess.
And though
I didn’t find a doctor right away—fearing all kinds of fury from this horse
that never once decried my presence and ineptitude—some townsfolk understood my
caveman talk and why in the world I’d be on a Lebanese horse. I’m guessing the
doctor made house calls like this pretty often, but still he wanted me to
‘drive’ as he climbed behind the saddle, and we made our way to the injured
man, where the doctor nodded at the tourniquet and said he’d be back. We
trusted the horse to retrace its gallop through the woods and made it to the
terrified wife, who delivered a beautiful girl about a half and hour later. By
then some distant neighbors caught up and massaged the whole thing to relief,
including a special transport for the man who sobbed his thanks in—I don’t
think it was Arabic anymore.
The rest of
the tour was not so joyful. The civil war was escalating, and our barracks blew
up that October. In the fallout I broke my leg in the same place as that
horseman; I wanted the chance to go up that mountain and commiserate, see the
baby crawl, but I was never going to know active military service again,
stateside or abroad. The lay me up at Walter Reed and cut me a severance
deal—well, a little like they’re doing me now, pushing early retirement. Or, to
call out the policy: no one over sixty on mounted duty. But we can talk about
that over a double scotch.
You could
say I took predictable routes getting my butt back home. I scrounged around
Washington for awhile to see what my continued study of Arabic could get me. If
I were patient—seven years—I might have been sought after as an asset for
Desert Storm. But I was three cities homeless by that lightning quick war. I kept
relatively clean—bodily, mentally, what’s carelessly called a ‘record’—but
really had to scrap for subsistence. Worked whatever shifts could be found, all
but loitered in a dozen different libraries, took what I read under bridges
where I slept, reflecting as a disguised Henry the Fifth: “I think the king is
but a man as I am”, and maybe I’d share that thought out loud, to strike some
conversation.
There
were—and are—too many vets under
those bridges, and I was not the only one to question,
“what have kings that privates have not
too,
Save
ceremony, save general ceremony?”
I do appreciate you gathered here, to hear that echo from
Shakespeare’s stage to how we face the modern age. Those of us who get here. I
was thinking of calling this speech ‘my kingdom for a horse!’—quoting an
anti-hero king, but who’s got time for that? My mam and pap called me ‘Rex’ to
celebrate the royalty I’d never have to abdicate.
I’m
grateful for the Fireweed Ranch that took me in—Chief Maengun, Randy, Galilahi—and
the late Reverend James who somehow got their contact. To say I was scared going
to the wild, wild west is not becoming of a soldier; to pretend I wasn’t is
also not becoming of a soldier, whatever other epithet I may have been. I was
there a decade before The Horse Whisperer,
so they could not call me that—and, fact of matter: I squealed my first weeks
through. But a season of grace enabled me to negotiate with mavericks and the
troubled kids that were there to learn to control their lack of control. And
now that I’ll have time (when Gloria asserts our grandkids have had their proper time), I’ll channel
Reverend James and seek some new supply for Fireweed.
I’m
grateful for my fellow cops at Precinct 5, for knowing that I’d do alright on
any beat and in the office, too. Then more than knowing what I really wanted to
do: work the stables, train for K9s, get out to the schools to show what
magnificent creatures we all are, if historically under lash and leash. Some
days and nights grew ugly when riots got too rough or drug raids got the glocks
out. I won’t be so glib to say we’ll talk those through a double scotch; I’ll
say too many lives were lost, no matter what majority we saved.
And
finally, for my Gloria, I’ll try again what angels must have led when I
scribbled out some courtship tankas to impress you. We’re too public here to
rehash those, but this twilight hour I want everyone to know:
you lift the lifeless
out of battlefields unwon—
never claiming loss,
making me uphold the same—
shrouding stones in loving moss…
stories are complete
despite the fractures untold—
for you were that mare
when I knew not how to steer—
the here, there, and everywhere…
now the great beyond
begins with what we unfold—
children rightly raised
check on us on their way out—
fulfilled, and gently amazed…
Daniel Martin Vold
Lamken (2017)
No comments:
Post a Comment